@Ace

Joel Splosky's blog is pretty cool. There's a compendium of his more famous blog posts out there, and it's an awesome read. It's undoubtedly web focussed, but the advice is brilliant.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Joel-Software-Occasionally-Interest-Ill-Luck/dp/1590593898

I hear that the Mythical Man Month is also good for that kind of advice, but I've not yet got round to it.

That blog from Muzzy was great, and possibly the only thing ive ever read that made me feel slightly better about my code (or my entire approach to everything like that which is use as much as possible i already know works fine even if its messy)

Like Dynamite, pure hobbyist perspective here but applied to games it does make sense the increasing use of solid game engines (Quick question, i hate calling them game engines mainly cause i hate the word 'game' to refer to the medium, i call it middleware instead. What is it meant to be called?) over the years. This exact process could be responsible for what Unity likes to call democratisation of games development, strong bases for developing gamesy things making it increasingly accessible to the less skilled in esoteric arts. I cant tell if i'm being tangential there but eh

And Dynamite, after co-foundering the main photo chatroom on deviantart for 6 years i got to see a lot of the attitude you described in some world reknown japanese camera design, and funny enough some world reknown german lens design

I never was that great at photography though, just absorbed a lot from the chatter

Engine is the correct term, Gunn. Middleware can include an engine, but it's much wider and usually features workflow stuff.

djchump wrote:

accreted...

WORD OF THE DAY.

LazyGunn wrote:

It's just 'games engine' sounds so childish given what this software can do that doesn't have a hint of game in it

I've heard some (possibly a little up their own arse) engine developers call them world engines. Anyway, so long as there's some context, there's nothing wrong with dropping the "games" prefix. Not that game is technically a childish term, of course; take game theory, for instance.

You can say they're ostensibly an avatar system but i see them as being used en masse to people a game world, you can do allsorts to their physical form, put them in relevant clothing, if you dont like the textures replace it with your own, smoosh it about in zbrush etc. Basically a freely available humanoid creator with a load of options there already and if you want to take it further, smoosh it up wit your art skills. It's an interesting thing when you look at games when theyre set in very familiar situations like a city or a sports field or the sky, and its pretty hard to provide content for this stuff quickly. It can be a pain in the arse to get clouds in unity, nevermind streets bustling with unique characters and varieties of cars filling the roads. Indie development stalls when it goes big cause no things to fill the space, and stuff like this seems to offer an option to get round it.

There's an api, you can generate them on the move, if you want a main character youve got their figure filled in, for free, take it out to faff in mudbox and mari. (even if you have to export as objs and rig and skin again). Unity indie dev also relies on highquality generic collections of objects and vegetation and wotnot to simulate having a team of artists working for you

But that was a mega tangent, no, theyre free ways to get characters (humanoids) into your games, associated tools and 3rd party accessories already trickling in. Wonder if this sort of thing would come common practice

Didn't know whether to put this here or in the other tech thread, but the other feels more like a tech support place than a general news thread, so, er, yeah. Here it is.

HP brings back Windows 7

if you browse to HP's home section and navigate to desktop PCs then you’ll only be presented with Windows 7 machines by default as no Windows 8 PCs are listed until you start customizing the section using optional filters.

...
HP’s "back by popular demand" wording is a clear knock towards Windows 8 which has struggled with perception issues thanks to what some see as a confusing mix of desktop and tablet-style computing.

...
HP is the first PC maker to take advantage of Windows 7 as a selling point over Windows 8, and it follows similar moves from OEMs who chose to promote Windows XP over Windows Vista years ago.

While 8 is no where near as bad as Vista, I think it's been a hard sell for Microsoft. I wonder if any other OEMs will follow suit and offer more 7 equipped hardware.

I don't mind Windows 8, but then I've got a touchscreen laptop and really fucking hate all the bevelling on 7. There's some real big issues with it though, no doubt. I'm expecting the next version to be pretty decent.

Also, that is the longest way of saying "yes, but with shit-loads more options" I've seen, Gunn.

They do all look at tad ugly, but I guess that's to be expected and a reasonable trade off.

Just realised that I understand less about Mantle than I originally thought.
I was thinking that Mantle allows a programmer to open a graphics context that the GPU has full responsibility for...

It does, but I also thought that this 'special' context will accept OpenGL commands (or even Direct X as an alternative). It doesn't...

It introduces a completely new language, is that right Chump?

What he said, the point of it being that it gives programmers much closer access 'to the metal' as it were, ideally for the good although it allows for the bad too, but its strength is that it cuts out the overhead usually associated with existing apis giving strong performance gains to anything that uses it - technically moving a pc game, typically behind consoles and their graphics performance on equivalent hardware, right alongside consoles, negating much from a development point of view much of the drawbacks of developing for a pc, a piece of high performance software (which a videogame usually is). It's why I bring it up in discussions about the competitiveness of non-propietary hardware (pc under a tv) vs designed to play games (console) as it ostensibly reduces the gap significantly

Some of the results there are really quite impressive.

https://twitter.com/fjsteele/status/434249935316615168/photo/1

Heh!

Let's hope they weren't farting while the said fire was being lit...

Fucking Microsoft...

1GB+ for a freeware dev enviroment? ~.~

Kind of ridic, directx11 isnt even properly adopted yet, what do they bring to the table with 12? Dx9 was the de-facto for a very, very, long time (and still is)

From murmurs i gather both directx and opengl have put forward notions of increased exposure to the metal, so to speak, praps to take the wind out of Mantle's sails, in fact the latest ogl (4.3?) already sports some of these apparently, but adoption is slow thanks to apple dragging its feet with staying in line with the current specification (Theres no other big money establishment sporting it)

I'm currently guessing they'll give directcompute a massive kick up the arse (gpu computing IS the future, absolutely no doubt, even the name 'gpu' is misleading now) and more focus on headline grabbers, possibly anticipated paradigm shift towards raster and raytraced hybrid arrangements. And possibly more explicit support for areas where 'next-gen' graphics technology needs to go - depending on the remit, possibly some big sdk demos featuring GI with no more fucking around, pbr, realtime genuine raytracing (real, actual, global glossy reflections) and things like that

Maybe i'm attributing too much to what should be a low-level api but i just have a very strong notion of what you'll see from ms, nvidia and amd regarding what they'll package in their sdks and support for it

In a perfect world though, directx could suck a fuck and opengl be a properly adopted cross-platform standard, with possibly mantle for the daring

I found the qualcomm branding odd too, while ogles is behind the curve, esp as mobiles are becoming valid platforms for serious graphics (Apparently unreal 4 has the tools for making mobile efforts look unbelievably good), i'd only imagine them building chipsets around dx for winmobile, whats winmobiles uptake atm?

The crazy drop in license fees had me thinking for a moment, and definitely a moment of consideration, but then i've got to the point that assuming unity 5.1 bring in the rest of compute crowd to even that out, Unity by 5 is then going to be quite formidable, and the organisation and ease of getting something working would have to be seen from U4 etc to really consider a switch - especially because when it comes to the shiny things, the asset store already has products that shoor Unity up when its new GI system (well, not new, but licensed), Enlighten, is only useful in particular situations, for eg. In fact, shiny wise, Unity's right there with them and what is splitting these engines are their toolset and what youre actually making with them, although im more than happy to accept U4 and cryengine are no longer just fps makers

Even at the given licensing costs, from my perspective i cant switch because if I want to do something I'm fully educated in in Unity, and I cant do it in U4, im suddenly a bit fucked. There are a good few of these as 3rd party support with unity is idiosyncratic in a very good way. Still, its a great initiative and its going to get way more people into game dev - I just cant really see Unity not returning this opening salvo (Not even including how plain exciting Unity 5 looks)

Next few weeks are going to be FUN, ive got the money (i think) for the Quixel suite, that's somewhat transformative in my work (megascans look incredible), and skyshop showcased stuff at the gdc expo that surprised a lot of people, im so glad I own this, pbr/ibl, is very exciting and should integrate nicely with not only Unity's coming GI, but existing 3rd party GI, a new released screen space reflection plugin and this all mixed with a ridiculously fun looking artflow - im pretty happy to be using unity, but i am glad the other main two have stopped being so stanky